


world gone mad

by WeeBeastie



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst and Feels, M/M, POV First Person, Possibly Unrequited Love, Post-Canon, Reflection, What Could Have Been
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 18:09:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21342514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeeBeastie/pseuds/WeeBeastie
Summary: so tell me what's the newsand what is it you want me to seewe're lying to ourselves[prequel to ‘all this bad blood here,’ inspired by a tumblr prompt]
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw & John Silver
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	world gone mad

**Author's Note:**

> HEY HI I AM BACK! I reblogged a list of one word prompts on Tumblr and got the word ‘rescue’ and Silverflint. Not sure what to do, I opened Google Docs and serendipitously found a long-abandoned WIP that was just begging to be edited and finished. Here it is! I hope y’all enjoy, it’s good to be back. <3
> 
> While I’ve called this a prequel to one of my other stories, you don’t really need to have read that one to understand this. Just know that my Jim Hawkins is 18ish rather than an actual child, and in my head he looks like Tudors-era Jonathan Rhys Meyers. 
> 
> Title & lyrics in the description from ‘World Gone Mad’ by Bastille.

How shall I begin?

It would perhaps make sense to begin by describing him. Capturing on paper the intensity of his eyes, the weight of his gaze resting full upon you. The gleam of his teeth, shark-like, when he snarls, spits, rages, or - rarely - smiles. Shall I compare thee to a maneater? Thou art more lovely and more violent. 

It would be too much to say that no words could truly do the man justice, but I must say exactly that. He is, or perhaps now was if the stories are to be believed, indescribable. A hurricane of a man, borne of rage and passion and such depth of feeling like none I’d ever known before my dealings with him, or have known since. 

Early on in my existence I made a pact with myself: no one person I encountered would change me in any sort of fundamental way. I would be changeable, of course; I would become who I needed to be in any given moment and change with the winds and the tides. But it would be at my own behest. No other human would ever be given such power as to influence me so. It seemed, and to this day seems, to me unsafe, giving so much of myself to any other member of mankind. Unsafe, inadvisable, certainly not a trap I’d let myself fall into. 

Except. 

He and he alone changed me. When I look into the glass now my face itself seems- different. He used to speak of monsters, my captain, and how and why society needs them. I see a monster like him now, in the warped looking glass in my cramped rooms. As I gaze upon myself a phrase from childhood rattles around in my skull, rapping at its confines: _speak of the wolf and the wolf is at your door_. I have. He was, and now I am become him. Like a fable, almost, a cautionary tale. Here lies whatever man came before, and risen from his ashes is the spectre of Long John Silver, burdened with terrible purpose. 

But I lose track of myself. 

I was meant to be describing him. 

He is - was? - a fox of a man, cunning and red, with jaws that bite and claws that snatch. Knowing him as I did I always found it difficult to picture what he might have been like as a fresh-faced lieutenant, as a lively youth, as a squalling newborn babe. It seemed much more likely to me that he’d sprung into being fully formed the way I knew him, as Pallas Athena from the head of Zeus. He was a terror, and a sight to behold. I seem incapable of describing him in true-to-life terms; such was his nature. His hair, his eyes, his stature and his voice - these are but the plain, simple facts about him. To convey properly the essence of that man one needs must indulge in a little figurative prose. More than a little, perhaps. 

The truth is this: I loved him. The truth is, I love him still. I couldn’t say it at the time, and saying so now, even only to myself in these aimless pages, does me no good at all. I have shied away from the truth for all my wretched life and where, indeed, has that habit brought me? Nowhere but to this all-consuming darkness, to an existence I never wanted and a face I do not recognize as my own. 

The lamp burns low and the rain has begun to lash the windows again. As a child I used to worry that in such terrible storms the windows of my room would break, burst apart and shower me in slivers of glittering glass. Death, then, by a thousand tiny cuts - and now in some small way I know how that feels. 

***

As soon as Silver sees Hawkins at his desk with the journal in hand, he knows. 

“So you’ve been reading,” he says, soft and low, and Jim jumps about a foot in the air. Startled, clearly, by Silver’s silent approach and sudden appearance. “About him.”

“I wasn’t, ah- I didn’t mean-” Jim stammers, turning to face Silver, guilt written all over his young face. 

“It’s alright,” Silver says on a blustery sigh, leaning against the doorframe. His leg aches so on these stormy nights. “I’m not upset that you read it, Jim. But please put it out of your mind. He’s gone now, no more than a ghost from my past.”

Jim’s brow furrows and he slinks closer, then closer still until he’s but a few paces away. His eyelashes glow golden in the lamplight. “He’s a ghost to you now, I understand that. But what was he then?” he asks, his eyes searching Silver’s face. 

Silver inhales, holds his breath for a moment. Considers the weight of what he says next, what his word choice will mean to Jim, to himself, to this whole endeavor. 

“Rescue,” he says at last, and brings one hand to his face, pressing palm to mouth and nose, fingers to closed eyes. It’s the ghastly truth: what Flint represented then was a new life, freedom, perhaps even the chance to discover who he really was and where he belonged. Rescue, salvation, deliverance from a misspent and wasted life. Belonging. 

“Would you go to him now, if you could? Would you...be…?” Jim is asking, and Silver feels his fingers close gently around his wrist, drawing his hand away from his face. 

He can hear the hitch in his own voice when he answers, haltingly, with a lie: “No.”


End file.
